RADIOACTIVE WASTE PROBLEM GETS WORSE

Hazardous waste incineration got another black eye during a
recent Congressional hearing. It seems that for a decade--perhaps
longer--hazardous waste incinerators have been illegally burning
radioactive wastes shipped to them illegally by the federal
Department of Energy (DOE), the agency responsible for managing
the nation's atomic bomb factories.

It wasn't even the government that initially discovered this
embarassment. Journalist Peter Shinkle began a series of articles
May 6, 1991, in the BATON ROUGE [LOUISIANA] TIMES about DOE
shipping radioactively-contaminated chemical wastes to a Baton
Rouge incinerator operated by Rollins Environmental Services--a
facility not licensed to accept radioactive wastes. Shinkle's
articles led first to a DOE investigation and later, on February
20, 1992, to a public hearing held by California Congressman
George Miller and the House Committee on Interior and Insular
Affairs.

Leo P. Duffy, a DOE assistant secretary, testified February 20
that between 1984 and 1991 some 113,000 cubic yards of
radioactive wastes (about 200 boxcar-loads weighing 7000 tons)
were shipped illegally to eleven chemical waste disposal
facilities (incinerators and dumps): Aptus in Coffeeville, Kansas
(1.6 million lb.); Chem Waste in Emelle, Alabama (4.2 million
pounds); Chem Waste in Chicago (1.1 million lb.); Chem Waste in
Sulpher, Louisiana (19,400 lb.); CECOS in Cincinnati, OH (133,000
lb.); ENSCO in El Dorado, Arkansas (3.6 million pounds); GSX (now
Laidlaw) in Reidsville, North Carolina (18,766 lb.); LWD in
Calvert City, Kentucky (86,440 lb.); Rollins in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana (2.4 million lb.); Rollins in Deer Park, Texas
(896,511 lb.); and SD Myers in Talmadge, Ohio (18,143 lb.). Duffy
testified that 25 DOE sites had shipped illegal radioactive
wastes and another 11 highly-suspect DOE sites remain to be
checked. DOE hasn't had time to check the records from these
additional sites because they have only known about the problem
for nine months, he said. Duffy said, in all, perhaps 150
incinerators, landfills, fuel blending operations, recyclers and
other waste facilities had accepted wastes from DOE but, so far,
DOE has only confirmed that illegal RADIOACTIVE wastes went to 11
or 12 of them. DOE is continuing to investigate itself and its
contractors, and Duffy promised to tell all as soon as all is
known

At the hearing February 20, various waste companies sent top
officials to testify. George VanderVelde, vice president of
science and technology for Chemical Waste Management (Chem Waste)
said his company has an extensive in-depth state-of-the-art
program for analyzing incoming wastes for radioactivity and, he
testified, "We have no indication that we received any undetected
radioactive substances from DOE facilities."

The credibility of VanderVelde's testimony was undercut somewhat
by subsequent testimony from Illinois Attorney General Roland W.
Burris, who presented an internal memo from a Chem Waste employee
dated February 6, 1992--two weeks before the hearing--saying that
Chem Waste's Chicago incinerator was at that time holding 97
drums of illegal radioactive waste they had received a year
earlier from DOE. Testimony indicated that Chem Waste had been
unable to burn these particular illegal radioactive wastes
because its incinerator had been shut down by an explosion in
early 1991.

Martin Marietta Energy Systems--the company that operates the Oak
Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, Tennessee), the Paducah
Gaseous Diffusion Plant (Paducah, Kentucky), and the Portsmouth
Gaseous Diffusion Plant (Portsmouth, Ohio)--sent its president,
Clyde Hopkins, to testify that his employees had been illegally
shipping radioactive wastes to waste disposers like Rollins and
Chem Waste for years. He said his employees used white-out
illegally to delete information from shipping manifests
indicating that the wastes were radioactive because they believed
"national security considerations" required them to. He said
enemies of the United States might glean valuable information
about U.S. atomic weapons by studying the wastes his staff had
been shipping illegally to Chem Waste and Rollins and the others.
He testified that his staff had been shipping uranium-238,
uranium-235 and technetium-99 mixed in with chemical wastes.
Additional information attached to his testimony indicated Martin
Marietta had reason to believe iodine-129, neptunium-237, and
thorium-232 were also being shipped off-site to various
incinerators and landfills. (It is worth noting that the federal
air pollution standard for thorium-232 is now five times stricter
than the standard for plutonium-239, so tiny amounts of such
wastes are dangerous.)

C. Randolph Warner, Jr., chairman of ENSCO, a major waste
incinerator company in Arkansas, which burned nearly 4 million
pounds of DOE's illegal radioactive wastes during the 1980s,
testified there was no problem. All the wastes his company burned
were safe, he said, including the illegal radioactive ones.

The total radioactivity shipped illegally by DOE was 1/10th of a
Curie, the DOE testified, and they trotted out a risk assessment
to show that, on average, probably no one would have been harmed
by dumping such small amounts of radioactivity into the
environment. This is the old averaging trick, commonly used in
risk assessments. Unfortunately, in the real world individuals
don't get exposed in an "average" way. Many may not be exposed at
all; a few may be exposed a great deal; the average exposure
remains low but those few people are in danger. It's like the
fellow said: if all the air were removed from this room for 10
minutes, the average amount of air during the year would hardly
change at all, but we would all be dead.

The problem of radioactive waste gets worse every time anyone
looks. April 9, Ohio's Senator John Glenn (Senate Committee on
Governmental Affairs) held a public hearing to announce that a
draft study by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has
identified a minimum of 45,361 potentially radioactively
contaminated sites across the U.S. Every state has some. Colorado
tops the list with 7,060 sites; Vermont has only 36. This
includes every place EPA could figure out where radioactivity has
ever been present. Not all these sites are contaminated in a
serious way but most are and will require cleanup. Just the DOE's
108 facilities--many of which are large, complex and badly
contaminated--are presently estimated to cost $160 billion to
clean up over the next 30 years. This estimate is almost
certainly low.

In addition to the 45,361 potentially contaminated sites--some 15
or 20 thousand of which may actually require cleanup--there are
another 1.5 million oil and gas wells where, it was discovered
last year, radioactive radium-226 and radium-228 have been
brought to the surface along with oil and gas. The insides of oil
extraction pipes are coated with a "scale" containing radium up
to 100,000 times higher than natural background levels. In
addition, much radioactivity from oil and gas wells has been
dumped into shallow pits. In some cases, oil companies have
donated old oil pipes to schools and municipalities, which have
made jungle gyms, swing sets and parking lot barriers out of
them. If old oil pipes are recycled, along with their
radioactivity, the radioactivity will be incorporated into new
metal products.

At Senator Glenn's hearing April 9, Dan Reicher from Natural
Resources Defense Council (NRDC) noted that the government has
never taken official notice of the radioactivity measurable in
ash produced by burning coal. There are some 52,400 coal-burning
power plants and industrial units, all of which are producing an
ash elevated in radioactivity a few times higher than natural
background levels.

EPA Deputy Assistant Administrator Michael Shapiro testified
April 9 that 1.1 billion tons of NORM (naturally occurring
radioactive material) wastes are produced each year by mineral
processing, coal power production, oil and gas exploration and
production, geothermal energy production, phosphorus and
fertilizer production, and water treatment. Such wastes are
entire ly unregulated.

Then there is wood ash, which, it was announced last year, is
radioactive as well. During the 1950s and 1960s, the United
States tested atomic bombs above-ground in Nevada. The resulting
radioactive fallout swept eastward, blowin' on the wind. The
radioactive strontium and cesium settled out onto the ground and,
as time passed, migrated into the soil. A-bomb enthusiasts
assumed, optimistically, that it had gone away.

In 1989, Stewart A. Farber, who manages environmental monitoring
for the Yankee Atomic Electric Company in Bolton, Massachusetts,
wondered if radioactive strontium and cesium from bomb fallout
had been taken up by tree roots.[1] On a whim he took some ash
from his home fireplace and tested it in his lab. It was about
100 times more radioactive than any other environmental sample he
had ever checked. Now two years later, Farber has checked 47
samples gathered by 16 scientists in 14 states and he says wood
ash "is a major source of radioactivity released into the
environment." Only wood ash from California (upwind of the Nevada
test site) seems free of radioactive fallout.

Farber says current regulations require wastes from a nuclear
power plant to be disposed of as radioactive wastes if they
contain one percent as much radioactivity as is found in wood ash
from New England.

Radioactivity is widely acknowledged to cause inheritable genetic
changes, immune system damage, reproductive damage, developmental
disorders, and cancer. It is also widely acknowledged that the
only truly safe dose of radiation is zero.

From the viewpoint of radioactive contamination alone, it makes
sense to begin phasing out petroleum, uranium, and coal. And for
similar reasons, presented earlier (see RHWN #225, #263, #264),
it would be smart to phase out chlorine, too.